


Give Me The Child

by Milligan (Blackheathen)



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:02:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24748042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blackheathen/pseuds/Milligan
Summary: Time runs so differently in the Underground, but grief is timeless.
Relationships: Jareth/Sarah Williams, Sarah Williams & Toby Williams
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	Give Me The Child

**Author's Note:**

> An old challenge fic, reposting for memory.

They just assumed he’d forgotten. He could tell by the careless way they spoke her name in those following years. Not the careful whisper behind closed doors or the hushed ‘don’t let him hear you’. No, it was Sarah this and Sarah that as if they were talking about someone they’d met at the park. No one he knew anymore, no difficult questions to answer on their part.   
  
He was only  four but he never forgot her. And he never asked where she was.   
  
He knew from an early age that he could define his life as before and after Sarah’s disappearance. The night itself was graven on his mind in a series of blue flashing images, tiny glimpses into her forbidden world illuminated by police lights on the cars outside. The light had made the glass eyes of her friends seem to blink too quickly, even Lancelot was like a wild thing trapped inside felt. Toby had wanted to say to his father, ‘ask  him ’ but he had been discovered too soon and ushered swiftly away. He’d picked pieces of glitter from the soles of his bare feet in the darkness of his room. He put them on the windowsill so the full moon could see them but in the  morning they were gone.   
  
And that was that. They never found a trace of Sarah ever again. Just the open bedroom window, leaves and dried flowers all over like a Wizard of Oz gale had swept her up into the sky. A runaway. That’s what the police had said but Toby knew his father had never believed it. He insisted on keeping her room just as it was and his mother would clean and dust it every Sunday, muttering under her breath all the while. It lasted a year that way and now everything was stuffed into boxes under the stairs. Toby could use the room for guests if he liked, for school friends when they came to stay. Which would’ve been great if he’d  actually had any.   
  
The world proved too confronting for Toby. He panicked easily, finding the  colours too harsh edged, the sounds too abrasive. The sharp lines of buildings and streets horrified him. His parents took him out of school and did their best to tutor him  themselves but he was always someplace else, flying dragons or battling wizards. It didn’t matter to Toby whether these activities were real or between the pages of a book. The therapists called him introverted, socially awkward at best. A daydreamer like his sister had been. His father kept a watchful eye on him, but Toby proved to be less adventurous than Sarah. He kept to his room where it was safe. He did run up and down the stairs with his eyes closed, but nobody noticed.   
  
Despite his erratic schooling, or perhaps because of it, he grew up into an overly wise teenager. He had a talent for drawing, discovered after a gift of pastels and inks arrived on his doorstep one day. Eventually this extended into graphic design and when he ventured out to college in his early  twenties he amazed his tutors with the fantastical details in his sketches. It was always  gardens for Toby. Strange gardens, but his parents smiled fondly at him when he occasionally showed them his work. Except he’d never been an outdoors child. He’d only ever climbed that one tree next to the spare room window, and that only once.   
  
He freelanced with several prominent design firms when he  graduated and his work won many awards. He prospered financially because his living expenses were so low. His parents began to drop unsubtle hints about moving out when he reached twenty-five or so. He didn’t argue with them and managed to look both cheerful and bereft as he waved them off as they drove away to retire someplace up the coast. Before night had fallen on his first day  alone he had unpacked all of Sarah’s things and replaced them in her room. He used his flash burned memory to put things exactly as they had been, right down to the books and pencils littering her desk. Moths had gotten to Lancelot so that parts of his fluffy innards spilled out.   
  
Then he closed the door and locked it up tight.   
  
Sometimes women and men would come to stay  over and they would ask about the locked door, but  more often than not it wouldn’t be noticed on account of the rarity of them being invited in. His relationships with others were brief and they always called it off first. Trust issues, apparently, or that’s what they said most of the time.   
  
His parents died when he was thirty or so. Run off the road and into a ditch. Toby was called to identify the bodies. The police report suggested that his father had been at fault, apparently he’d been acting erratically for some weeks beforehand; leaving the house and not returning for days and unable to explain where he’d been except to say he’d been looking for something.   
  
Toby continued to work diligently into his late thirties until one day he was looking out his window at nothing  in particular and he felt his mind crumble around him. He laid down his beloved inks and pencils, stopped working on his contracts and answering the phone. He would have stayed crouched in the corner of his room for quite a while, he knew, except for the insistent tapping that began at the front door.   
  
It was a Dorothy moment, he recalled later. Just like in his  favourite movie when she pulled back the door to her little cottage after the storm and everything went from black and white to glorious  colour . He wanted to shield his eyes from  her but he couldn’t make his hands move. And her voice, cutting through the mist in his head.   
  
“Toby?”   
  
Exactly the same . And again, with just the exact amount of girlish tremor.   
  
“Toby, is that you?”   
  
“Yes” Had he said that? No, that wasn’t his voice but another that he knew just as well. The Goblin King, who was standing in the shadow to the right of the entranceway. Toby watched as a long finger settled briefly on Sarah’s shoulder as he leaned forward. “I warned you, my love. Tell me I did not”   
  
“No Jareth. You were right. It’s just so…”   
  
“Unfair?”   
  
“No, not that. Unexpected maybe. It seems like only a year since I left but now…” A pause and a deep breath as she squared her shoulders, “how old are you Toby?”   
  
He had to think about that for a second. “Umm, forty.”   
  
“My God. That makes me, wait, fifty-six!”   
  
It had always been about Sarah.   
  
They came in liked they owned the place, Sarah exclaiming from time to time about the state of the house. Was he still a bachelor, she wanted to know? It certainly seemed like it from the mess in the kitchen. Toby watched her, morbidly fascinated by how much the same she was in simple appearance (or perhaps more like the perfected image he’d created over the years) but so different at the same time. She was a woman now. The Goblin King stood in the  centre of the lounge  and also followed her every move with his lopsided gaze, his expression openly delighted at her prattling. Toby shivered whenever those bird eyes passed over  him but it was a nice shiver, he  realised . Had anyone ever really looked at him like that? Like an exotic and fascinating fish in a bowl?   
  
Sarah was getting very animated and a little muddled with the time span she'd just missed. She wanted ice cream, Merlin and a newspaper. The Goblin King reeled her in with an outstretched hand, soothing her with long covetous strokes of her hair. All too quickly a feast of desserts appeared on the dining table and her delighted laugh made the Goblin King melt, or so it seemed to Toby. He really loved her. Jareth adored his sister. Toby took her out to the garden where the old dog’s weathered marker lay in the long grass.   
  
“Oh Merlin.”   
  
She was in his arms too quickly, trembling and Toby held her, his long frame dominating hers. It was all wrong because she had always been the comforter. She should be holding him, singing him to sleep or telling tales that a fox lord had told her. He tried to make himself smaller, to slip into her embrace but it just didn’t work. They didn’t fit together  any more .   
  
Back inside, they glutted themselves on ice creams and stories while the Goblin King paced idly to and  fro , humming to himself. Sarah told Toby many of the adventures she’d had in the Labyrinth in the ‘year’ since she’d been there. It was a wild and unruly land at times, she said, full of goblins, pixies and dwarves who came there from the ‘ overlands ’ to find protection in Jareth’s realm. But it was also haven to  less desirable creatures, ever at war with each other over the most trivial reasons. She spoke of the Goblin King sometimes as if he weren’t standing right behind her. He was a fair and protective ruler, she informed him, and she had been learning a lot from being at his side. The compliment brought said ruler to her side where he bent forward gracefully to caress her cheek, the long black glove trailing downwards to rest on her stomach. The sideways look he gave Toby formed the seed of a knot in his stomach, the ice cream curdling as he noticed the telltale bump under her clothes.   
  
Following his stare, Sarah blushed furiously and spoke happily to the preening Goblin King, “Jareth, if it’s a boy can we call him Toby?”   
  
“If you wish, Sarah,” he said close to her ear, “But now we must go. You need to rest.”   
  
“ Oh but I can’t! I don’t want to go yet. Toby hasn’t even told me anything about himself, why, he’s barely said a word.”   
  
“I doubt he’s had the chance, my love. You do entrance an audience, even of two. And I can’t stay here. You know that.”   
  
“Then let me stay  please? Just for tonight. You can come back for me tomorrow.”   
  
“I suppose…” replied the Goblin King, but he looked doubtful and his eyes appraised Toby mercilessly. “I trust no harm will come to you in your own home, and it would be…”   
  
“Fair.”   
  
“Ah yes, fair it is then,” he laughed gently at her jibe, and then in an aside stage whisper to Toby, “We have had many discussions on the nature of fairness.” He reached into a pocket and slipped a familiar little red book into her hands. “You  do remember the words, don’t you?” he asked, clucking his tongue at her playful pout. The gold lettering seemed to burn in Toby’s mind so that he missed the rest of their quiet words to each other. Their parting kiss was passionate, two strong wills battling for the dominance of it.   
  
The Goblin King clasped his hands together and bowed, his lips moving silently as the air swirled to life around him, cloaking his form as it changed into a snowy white owl that flew straight up into a shimmering disc of light that closed after him.   
  
“Why can’t he stay?” Toby asked finally after the dust had settled.   
  
“Hmm?”   
  
“Why can’t he stay here?”   
  
“Oh. It’s this world. It sickens his people, weakens them. Even an hour is too much, so he says”. She yawned and stretched. “He’s right though, I do need to rest up. I’ll bed down on the lounge, and in the  morning you must tell me everything about you.”   
  
“And mum and dad.”   
  
“Oh yes, of course. Everything.”   
  
“You don’t want to stay in your room then?” Toby asked.   
  
“My room? You mean, it’s still mine? Like I left it?”   
  
He handed her the key and trailed in her wake as she flew up the stairs. She shrieked like a schoolgirl when she opened the door and found everything in its place, barring of course the red book which she still clutched in her hand.   
  
“This is fantastic Toby. Has it been like this all these years?”   
  
“For a few. I tried to put everything right, but I couldn’t find that” Toby said, gesturing to the book, “You had it all along.”   
  
“Of course. It’s the link, silly. Can’t just leave things like that laying around. Who knows who might have found  it. ”   
  
“Little brothers perhaps.”   
  
“Absolutely.” she agreed, waving it for emphasis. Then she sobered momentarily. “Did you miss me Toby?”   
  
“I was four.”   
  
“Ah. Still my baby brother back then, and even now though you’re not so much with the little part.”   
  
“I must look so old to you.”   
  
“No!” she exclaimed, but he could see the lie in her.   
  
“I am though. Maybe next time you come to visit I’ll be an old greybeard in a rocking chair on the porch. Or maybe I’ll be dead.”   
  
“ Toby, don’t say such things like that. It’s not my fault that time passes so differently…”   
  
“No, it was never your fault about anything was it?”   
  
“Toby, what’s wrong with you?” Sarah said, “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”   
  
“I am, and I’m sorry. Guess I’m tired, too. Goodnight sister.” he said quickly, damping down his rising irritation and giving her cheek a brief kiss. Sarah looked uncertain, but mostly relieved as he left the room.   
  
Back in his own space, he  retreated back to his corner and drew the tattered threads of his life around him in the darkness.   
  
Long after midnight he returned to her. She was sleeping, stretched out on her narrow bed, still in the clothes she’d arrived in. The moon had come to shine in through her window, cloaking her in silver. It picked out the glittering false eyes of the tiny Goblin King doll. The doll was staring, impotent, as he sat on the edge of the bed and slipped his hands around her neck. The fight for breath woke her, her eyes huge pits of black as she struggled to form words, voiceless. Toby found he didn’t care to know what she was trying to say. This was always going to be a  one way conversation anyway, he reasoned.   
  
He told her about himself while her skin turned the dusky blue of a  birds egg. When she was  stilled he released his hold and smoothed down her hair and wiped clean the trickle of blood from her mouth. Her skin was soft and immediately reminded him of the velvet binding of the book which she still held in her hand.   
  
He thumbed the pages briefly and spoke the words. Here was where his story ended.


End file.
